Jive Increases International - and Local - Presence

The US may be its home, but Jive Software has a hankering to get international -- and local.

New Jive Data Center, Employees, Languages

You know things are going relatively well when you need to expand overseas. Jive has opened a new data center in Amsterdam, Netherlands, offering more local access to customers in Europe who are working with the social business platform. Add to that 70% employee growth in the region in 2012 alone and you have further proof things are moving.

To help with the language differences, Jive will be improving support for a number of new languages. By the end of 2012 expect French, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and Russian versions of the Jive platform and another eight more European languages in 2013.

There's strong demand for Jive's unmatched social business solutions throughout continental Europe," said Jay Larson, president, worldwide field operations of Jive Software. "By significantly increasing the number of employees in Europe, improving local language support and adding a Jive staffed data centre on the continent, I am confident we can provide the highest levels of service to existing and future Jivecustomers."

Strong Demand for Social Business Software

Jive is doing very well. With a strong third quarter in 2012, the publicly traded company saw revenues of US$ 28.9 million (of which $25.9 was for products). That's a 48% increase year over year.

With some of the revenue, Jive went out picked up a couple of companies to build on its platform, including Meetings.io and Producteev (both of which support Social CRM along with collaboration). I suspect they aren't done yet.

Jive's View on the Yammer News

Jive had a few things to say about Microsoft's new Yammer pricing strategy, acknowledging that Microsoft is moving in the right direction:

Since inception, we at Jive have had a consistent point of view on “free” in the enterprise. We believe that in business, people pay for what they value – and while you can remove the risk for a business executive by allowing him/her to evaluate a solution before purchase - freemium is not a model that makes sense for any business platform that will enable an entire organization in the long term. If your offering clearly solves a problem and delivers business value then you will have no trouble convincing an executive to pay for it...[]Yammer’s pricing change represents an important inflection point in the market which we see as a good first step back towards conversations about the real value of social platforms. "

Is the social software vendor concerned that this new, tighter Yammer/SharePoint integration might hurt them? Hard to say, but with its new cloud offering, and its SharePoint integration, you can bet it's going to fight the good fight.

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